Kinematic modeling and control of a multi-joint soft inflatable robot arm with cable-driven mechanism

In this paper, the kinematic modeling and control for a multi-joint inflatable robot arm with cable-driven mechanism are proposed. The soft inflatable robot arm is capable of imitating human arms to realize remote interaction. The weight of the arm is only about 50 grams, and collision safe. To solve the challenge problems of kinematics of the soft inflatable arm, new approaches are proposed, including redundant rigid arm and soft inflatable joint models. The approaches have a good advantage of applying to muti-joint arms. As our knowledge it is the first time to solve the kinematics of muti-joint soft inflatable arm in Three-Dimensional coordinate space. Numerous experiments have been conducted, including movement space and positioning accuracy. The workspace and velocity are close to an adult´s arm movement space and normal motion speed.